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NSP4 Pragmatist Kant Nordic NSP Studies in Pragmatism Helsinki — 2019 Giovanni Maddalena “Anti-Kantianism as a Necessary Characteristic of Pragmatism” In: Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski´ and Sami Pihlstrom¨ (Eds.) (2019). Pragmatist Kant—Pragmatism, Kant, and Kantianism in the Twenty-first Century (pp. 43–59). Nordic Studies in Pragmatism 4. Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network. issn-l 1799-3954 issn 1799-3954 isbn 978-952-67497-3-0 Copyright c 2019 The Authors and the Nordic Pragmatism Network. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. CC BY NC For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ Nordic Pragmatism Network, NPN Helsinki 2019 www.nordprag.org Anti-Kantianism as a Necessary Characteristic of Pragmatism Giovanni Maddalena Universit`adel Molise 1. Introduction Pragmatists declared their anti-Cartesianism at the first appearance of the movement, in Peirce’s series on cognition written for the Journal of Specu- lative Philosophy (1867–8). As is well known, the brilliant young scientist characterized Cartesian doubt as a “paper doubt”, by opposing it to sci- entists’ true “living doubt” (Peirce 1998 [1868], 115).1 Some readers have not understood the powerful novelty that his opposition to Cartesianism implies. According to Peirce, research does not proceed from skeptical, “paper” doubt. For Peirce, doubt is possible because of a previous cer- tainty, a position which is similar to the one held by Augustine (Augustine 1970). Research moves from one certainty to another; the abandonment of an initial certainty is only reasonable in the presence of a real and surprising phenomenon that alters one of the pillars on which it stands. Peirce never abandoned this position, even as he corrected the psycholo- gism of his first approach—which paired certainty with satisfaction—in a more realistic direction; he placed this process of correction into a logi- cal pattern by inserting the “surprising phenomenon” as an internal step within the logic of abduction (hypothesis). In these foundational writings of pragmatism, Peirce assigned both intuitionism and introspectivism to the enemies list, together with “paper doubt”. In opposition to Descar- 1 For quotations to Peirce in this paper, I include the year of the quotation in brackets. This is necessary in order to stress the chronology of Peirce’s statements, which will reveal his progressive abandonment of Kant’s philosophy. 43 44 Pragmatist Kant tes, Peirce refused any form of intellectualism, and the entire pragmatist movement has followed his lead in this regard. However, this argument against Descartes is still insufficient to define pragmatism as a movement. Empiricists, existentialists, and hermeneuti- cians were also anti-Cartesians. Pragmatism clarifies the attack on Descar- tes by means of a second attack on Kant. This second attack has always been overlooked, primarily because of Peirce’s initial reverence for the Ger- man thinker. In fact, the founder of pragmatism referred to the Critique of Pure Reason as the “tables brought down from Sinai” (cp 4.2 [1898]). He gave his doctrine a name borrowed from Kant (cp 5.412 [1905]), insisting that the Kantian problem of the unity of the manifold was the central issue of epistemology (Peirce 1992 [1867], 1). However, Peirce’s unconditional appreciation of Kant faded away over time. This change brought out some critical remarks about issues that had always nagged Peirce. As early as 1868, he said that the real philosophical question was not, “How are synthetical judgments a priori possible?” but suggested that “before asking that question he [Kant] ought to have asked the more general one, ’How are any synthetical judgments at all possi- ble?”’ (cp 2.690 [1869]). Jean-Marie Chevalier (2013) showed that, from the start, Peirce understood Kant in a peculiar way that Chevalier calls “Leib- nizian”. In this paper, I attempt to generally summarize the relationship between the ideas of Peirce and Kant as clearly and faithfully as possible. I will set aside all the harsh statements Peirce made in the second part of his life charging Kant with superficial or hasty logic. These statements should be avoided because most of them are contained in unpublished manuscripts, raising questions about whether it was Peirce’s intention to express himself in that way. They are useful as background, however, for pointing us in a conceptual direction, a direction followed by European and American classical pragmatists. I describe this anti-Kantian track herein by recapitulating Peirce’s remarks on Kant (in section 2) and casting a quick glance at the views of the philosopher expressed by other classical pragmatists (section 3) so that we can understand why anti-Kantianism is a necessary characteristic of pragmatism. 2. Peirce’s march toward anti-Kantianism We mentioned Peirce’s early allegiance to the Kantian flock. Even if his philosophy was characterized by an original twist on Kant’s categories and an idealist turn of the phenomenon-noumenon distinction, Peirce did Maddalena – Anti-Kantianism as a Necessary Characteristic... 45 not criticize Kant explicitly in his series of articles in the 1860s. A hidden critique is implicit in his mention of the a priori method for fixing beliefs in Illustrations of the Logic of Science published during the years 1878–9. In this work, Peirce describes the a priori method as one of three ineffec- tive methods of inquiry, together with tenacity and authority. A fourth, effective method is the realist method of science and the connected social view of logic. 2.1 Against the “Thing in Itself” Starting from 1884, Peirce emphasized his criticisms of Kant more and more, particularly in light of the deepening of his idea of “continuity”, the true keystone of his philosophy. His mind evolved with respect to this topic, gradually passing from his original Kantian version of the idea into a Cantorian one. Thanks to Peirce’s discovery of Georg Cantor’s theorem and paradox (arrived at independently of the German mathematician), he came to prefer a unique view that places real continuity beyond any logical or metrical calculation.2 Peirce’s concept of continuity, and Kant’s alleged misconception of it, allowed Peirce to understand why in Kant’s thought there is always a “gap” between knowledge and the reality to be known, between the “phe- nomenon” and the “thing-in-itself”. This gap had troubled him since his early philosophical studies (Peirce 1981, 37–44). During the last twenty years of his life, Peirce considered the permanence of this schism to be the epiphenomenon of an entire intellectual attitude, that is, nominalism, understood here in a very different way from a mere rejection of the ex- istence of universals. One can believe that universals are real, yet still be a nominalist if he/she thinks that universals are hopelessly beyond the inferential capacities of humankind. Nominalism affirms an unbridgeable gap or discontinuity between reality and reason. In this view, realism maintains that reason belongs to reality and in the long run, after inquiry, it would be able to know reality. This is a decisive break with Kant’s tran- scendentalism. Peirce synthetizes it using the terms “pragmaticism” and “critical common-sensism” in the following way: The present writer was a pure Kantist until he was forced by succes- sive steps into Pragmaticism. The Kantist has only to abjure from the bottom of his heart the proposition that a thing-in-itself can, how- ever indirectly, be conceived; and then correct the details of Kant’s 2 See Zalamea 2012, Moore 2007a and 2007b, Havenel 2008, and Maddalena 2009, 193–224. 46 Pragmatist Kant doctrine, and he will find himself to have become a critical common sensist. Peirce 1998 [1905], 353–4 The irony of the quote lies in the “only”. To abjure from the bottom of one’s heart the “thing-in-itself” is to abjure the entire distinction between phenomenon and noumenon, which is the kernel of Kant’s Copernican revolution. When we abandon the “thing-in-itself”, we are left with either a profound idealism or a profound realism. In fact, Peirce thought that there was no difference at all between those two possibilities (Lane 2018)— he called his doctrine “real-idealism” and he boasted: “My philosophy resuscitates Hegel, though in a strange costume” (cp 1.42 [1892]). This first theoretical point underlines another characteristic of Peirce’s thought and the treatment of it in the scholarship. It is possible to read the first part of Peirce’s production as reflecting an idealist view that would be corrected in the second half of his life by a sort of transcendental realism.3 However, the manuscripts seem to indicate a different path. If this reading reflected the actual situation, it is difficult to conceive of Peirce’s philos- ophy as a unity. In fact, Tom Short (2007) split Peirce’s work into two halves: the idealist and the (transcendental?) realist. There is, however, no hint of this split in Peirce’s texts, even though they sometimes describe corrections to previously held views. Of course, one can say that Peirce’s ideas changed without his noticing it; however, setting aside the issue of Peirce’s self-knowledge, his texts show something else. As far as Kant is concerned, the texts go from an explicit appreciation to increasingly stronger critiques. Moreover, Peirce considered his early papers to be suffused with a kind of realism, even the texts prepared for the Metaphys- ical Club in the early 1870s. Besides, he considered his later production to accord more with Hegel’s monism than with Kant’s transcendentalism. About the latter, he thought that its logical bases were weak (cp 2.31 [1902]) and that the crucial distinction between synthetic and analytic judgments was “so utterly confused that is difficult or impossible to do anything with it” (Peirce 1998 [1903], 218).
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